As the possibility of typhoons and heavy rains in the near future can not be ruled out, plans for practical land use and public safety have become extremely urgent, Vice President Annette Lu (
At a meeting held by the Presidential Office's technology consultation task force yesterday, Lu said that the top priority for the country -- which has seen deadly flooding and landslides brought on by recent typhoons and tropical storms -- is scheming up practical policies for the use of state owned land and ensuring the safety of residents in disaster-prone areas.
"Ensuring land is used safely and sustainably has become one of the most urgent issues for Taiwan. Based on our experience in recent years, landslides and mudflows have become unavoidable in the wake of heavy rains," Lu said.
Lu also said that this could be attributed to a number of phenomena. including unstable weather brought on by global warming, "the loosening" of mountainous areas by the 921 Earthquake in 1999, heavy logging and the overconsumption of natural resources.
Officials with the Council of Agriculture (COA) yesterday released a report on the devastating impact of Tropical Storm Mindulle in early July and Typhoon Aere late last month could be attributed to the unwise use of land close to riverbanks (know as buffering zones).
"Villages built illegally in buffering zones are just like expensive sediment storage dams," the council's Soil and Water Conservation Bureau director-general Wu Huei-long (吳輝龍) said.
Chang Chin-hu (
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
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XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods